[gl-como] PostgreSQL 8.0 Out Now

[Pietro Bertera]

What's New in 8.0

Win32 Native Server
This is the first PostgreSQL release to natively run on Microsoft
Windows as a server. It can run as a Windows service. This release
supports NT-based Windows releases like Win2000, XP, Win2003. Older
releases like Windows 95, 98, and ME are not supported because these
operating systems do not have the infrastructure to support PostgreSQL.
A separate installer project has been created to ease installation on
Windows: http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller.

Although tested throughout our release cycle, the Windows port does not
have the benefit of years of use in production environments that
PostgreSQL has on Unix platforms and therefore should be treated with
the same level of caution as you would a new product.

Previous releases required the Unix emulation toolkit Cygwin for Win32
server support. PostgreSQL has always supported clients on Win32.


Savepoints
Savepoints allow specific parts of a transaction to be aborted without
affecting the remainder of the transaction. Prior releases had no such
capability; there was no way to recover from a statement failure within
a transaction except by aborting the whole transaction. This feature is
valuable for application writers who require error recovery within a
complex transaction.


Point-In-Time Recovery
Though PostgreSQL is very reliable, in previous releases there was no
way to recover from disk drive failure except to restore from a previous
backup or use a standby replication server. Point-in-time recovery
allows continuous backup of the server. You can recover either to the
point of failure or to some transaction in the past.


Tablespaces
Tablespaces allow administrators to select the file systems used for
storage of tables, indexes, and entire databases. This improves
performance and control over disk space usage. Prior releases used
initlocation and manual symlink management for such tasks.


Improved Buffer Management, CHECKPOINT, VACUUM
This release has a more intelligent buffer replacement strategy, which
will make better use of available shared buffers and improve
performance. The performance impact of vacuum and checkpoints is also
lessened.


Change Column Types
A column's data type can now be changed with ALTER TABLE.


New Perl Server-Side Language
A new version of the plperl server-side language now supports a
persistent shared storage area, triggers, returning records and arrays
of records, and SPI calls to access the database.


Comma-separated-value (CSV) support in COPY
COPY can now read and write comma-separated-value files. It has the
flexibility to interpret non-standard quoting and separation characters
too.


-- 
Pietro Bertera 
E-mail: pietro@bertera.it
GPG key fingerprint: 3B3F 2C4B 487C E5E8 080C  03B3 0C9C AB85 E774 31A4